I just purchased a BCT15 scanner, but I think it may have been a mistake. I want to listen to Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD) and the Colorado State Patrol (CSP), and as a secondary interest the local military bases and military air. I also especially want to monitor the CSPD helicopter, which always seems to be either where the action is, or buzzing my house.
I thought the “Trunktracker III” would allow me to listen to CSPD since my research told me that CSPD uses a Motorola type II system, but from what I read on this site, it requires a “digital scanner.” Since I just paid around $200 for the BCT15, I’m not to happy at the prospect of buying another, even more expensive unit….. but I think I can still return the BCT-15 especially if I upgrade.
Also, this scanner is very hard for me to understand. I have some older scanners, and I understood how they worked- you figure out the frequencies you want (either by using the scanner to search for them, or looking it up in a book or online) and you program them into the scanner. If you have a lot of channels, you divide them up into “banks”- organized by type (police, fire, ambulance, etc) or by geography if you travel, or both if you have a lot of banks. This scanner is much more complicated than that- It has CTCSS / DTS, alert tones, tone-outs, talk groups, control channels, close call options, weather SAME settings, and much, much more, all accessed through a menu system whose organization baffles me. There are even indicators which appear on the LCD that are not described anywhere in the manual (that I can find anyway). Maybe some good scanner interfacing software will let me see the big picture better.
Anyway, are there any books or websites I can study get a sound understanding of how this all works so I can understand how to use all these settings and how to set up to monitor various systems? I find the owner’s manual to be very disorganized, as if 20 different people each wrote a chapter, and assumed someone else wrote the section that imparts the understanding of how to make the leap from “this is how to turn it on and how to listen to the NOAA weather channels” to Thumbnail sketches of each trunking system.
I don’t mind doing some reading and putting out a little effort to make this thing work, but I bet most people who buy one of these end up returning it or giving up and hiding it in the closet unless they are more than just casual scanner listeners. Maybe it is the case that with trunking becoming so popular, the days of the “casual” scanner listener are at an end.
Sorry this is so long, but I have a lot of frustration to vent. Anyway, to sum up:
Can you recommend a scanner which will work for CSPD?
Helicopter?
Can you recommend some places to get a good understanding of how these communications systems work so that I can understand how to program this or similar scanner?
I thought the “Trunktracker III” would allow me to listen to CSPD since my research told me that CSPD uses a Motorola type II system, but from what I read on this site, it requires a “digital scanner.” Since I just paid around $200 for the BCT15, I’m not to happy at the prospect of buying another, even more expensive unit….. but I think I can still return the BCT-15 especially if I upgrade.
Also, this scanner is very hard for me to understand. I have some older scanners, and I understood how they worked- you figure out the frequencies you want (either by using the scanner to search for them, or looking it up in a book or online) and you program them into the scanner. If you have a lot of channels, you divide them up into “banks”- organized by type (police, fire, ambulance, etc) or by geography if you travel, or both if you have a lot of banks. This scanner is much more complicated than that- It has CTCSS / DTS, alert tones, tone-outs, talk groups, control channels, close call options, weather SAME settings, and much, much more, all accessed through a menu system whose organization baffles me. There are even indicators which appear on the LCD that are not described anywhere in the manual (that I can find anyway). Maybe some good scanner interfacing software will let me see the big picture better.
Anyway, are there any books or websites I can study get a sound understanding of how this all works so I can understand how to use all these settings and how to set up to monitor various systems? I find the owner’s manual to be very disorganized, as if 20 different people each wrote a chapter, and assumed someone else wrote the section that imparts the understanding of how to make the leap from “this is how to turn it on and how to listen to the NOAA weather channels” to Thumbnail sketches of each trunking system.
I don’t mind doing some reading and putting out a little effort to make this thing work, but I bet most people who buy one of these end up returning it or giving up and hiding it in the closet unless they are more than just casual scanner listeners. Maybe it is the case that with trunking becoming so popular, the days of the “casual” scanner listener are at an end.
Sorry this is so long, but I have a lot of frustration to vent. Anyway, to sum up:
Can you recommend a scanner which will work for CSPD?
Helicopter?
Can you recommend some places to get a good understanding of how these communications systems work so that I can understand how to program this or similar scanner?
